It is sometimes desirable to ascertain the attitude of a speaker towards entities or events described in the speaker's speech. Some methods of attitude evaluation involve merely summing the number of spoken terms having positive versus negative connotations to derive a summary score. For example, positive words can be assigned a positive value while negative words are assigned a negative value. In this approach, the sum of the values would represent the (positive or negative) attitude of the speaker. This approach is too simplistic, however, since it does not discriminate between entities and/or events, some of which the speaker may view in a positive light and others the speaker may view negatively. Another limitation of this approach is that it fails to take into account the influence that context can have on nominally positive or negative terms.